Debbi Fields as Debra Sivyer was born on 18 September 1956, in East Oakland, California USA, and as Debbi Fields is a businesswoman and author, best known as the founder and spokesperson of Mrs. Fields Cookies.
A noted entrepreneur, how wealthy is Debbi Fields now? According to sources, Fields has amassed a fortune of over $65 million, as of early 2017, acquired through her involvement in the bakery business which began in the mid-1970s.
Debbi Fields Net Worth $65 Million
Fields grew up in middle-class surroundings in Oakland, the youngest of five siblings. In her teens, she had already become interested in baking, finding great passion in baking cookies, and began experimenting with recipes, developing cookie baking techniques in her family’s kitchen. She was able to purchase the ingredients to enjoy her favorite pastime of baking cookies by working in the Oakland A’s baseball organization as a ‘ball girl’. By her adulthood, she had established a great reputation for her rich cookie recipes.
Fields attended Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California. In 1977 she decided that she wanted more than being a housewife, and despite general scepticism, she managed to get a loan and open a small cookie store in Palo Alto, California, called Mrs Fields Chocolate Chippery. The business soon became a booming success and Fields’ net worth began to grow.
Shortly afterwards she began to open more stores, expanding her business first within the San Francisco Bay area, then throughout California. In 1982 she moved the company’s headquarters to Park City, Utah, and began adding new products, such as candy, oatmealraisin muffins, brownies and various cookie combinations, which additionally improved the business. As the company began to diversify beyond the venerable chocolate chip, its name was eventually changed to Mrs. Fields Cookies, with Fields serving as the company’s President and CEO.
By the late ’80s the company used a state-of-the-art computer system to streamline operations and production schedules for cookies, developed by Fields’ husband. Fields now owned 425 stores across the USA and abroad, making annual retail sales of over $87 million. Her wealth was boosted.
However,in the early ‘90s, she was forced to give up 80% of the company’s assets in order to write off debts. However, she has remained involved in the company, serving as its official spokesperson.
A housewife turned successful businesswoman, Fields ran her business by setting extremely high standards, retaining personal control over all her cookie-baking operations, and committing to quality. This enabled her to establish such a large and successful company and to amass a significant net worth. Today, the company she founded is one of the largest retailers of cookies, brownies and frozen yogurt in the USA.
Apart from her involvement in Mrs Fields Cookies, Fields is also an author, writing her autobiography entitled “One Smart Cookie: How a Housewife’s Chocolate Chip Recipe Turned into a Multimillion-Dollar Business: The Story of Mrs. Fields Cookies”, as well as several cookbooks, the most notable of them being “Mrs. Fields Cookie Book: 100 Recipes from the Kitchen of Debbi Fields”. She has also appeared as a motivational speaker across the country.
In her personal life, in 1976 Fields married Randall Fields, an economist who is credited for the growth of Mrs Fields Cookies and its management in great part, and the founder of Fields Investment Group – the couple has five daughters. They divorced in 1997, and the following year she married Michael Rose, former CEO of Harrah’s, Inc; the couple resides in Memphis, Tennessee.
